Author: Tom Kern

Take what is mine…. bury what is mine…

So one nice thing about the WordPress blog is I found a add on that updates the whole back end for me auto-magically.  And after having used it a couple of times I can say that honestly it works way better then the old method.  You know me FTPing everything down to the MAC… uploading the new files… enabling the new files… making sure I didn’t bork anything in the process.  I like this auto upgrade feature way more then the old manual method.

Yes folks this is what you get for a update when I’m on vacation… A update about how easy the plug in to update the blog is to operate.

Oh btw I’m on vacation and I have Internet access!  Which while is exciting it keeping me from paying attention to the election… No wait this Internet on vacation is just what the doctor ordered!

So what does a vacation for Tom look like… well it looks like one of the following

– Camping in the high grasslands of Arizona looking for Elk.

– Hanging out in Williams while looking for Elk/Deer

-Hanging out in Kingman while kind of looking for Deer and drinking alot of beer (this is the one I’m currently on)

– Camping on the dark side of Catalina with six kids and 5 adults… guess who doesn’t have any kids and was having no part of the kids.

-Camp at NASCAR while drinking beer (this is next week)

So all and all when I go on extended runs of vacation I tend to camp and drink beer.

Maybe I should expand my horizons, you know maybe take a trip to another country and drink their beer.

Man that sounds expensive… I think I will keep camping and drinking my own beer.

Who knows maybe while I’m out looking for Deer someone I know personally will post *cough*curtis*cough* *cough*eve*cough*

You know stranger things have happened like me coming back with something…

Cinderlla man doing what you can…

Good luck figuring out what song that title came from… if you get the band I will be immpressed if you get the band and song there’s a bottle of Whiskey and Box of Nilla Wafers for the winner.

It should also be noted the lyrics are what I’m hearing at 1/2 volume on my Mac… So open up your song lyric filters just a bit.

I wonder if Angels are on salary or are hourly?  You know just one of those thoughts… maybe they are like clergy and dedicated to their life and don’t recieve any kind of pay per se…. it’s worth thinking about.  You never know when you will run into a homicidal angel that’s been trapped in Wisconsin for a millenia or two.

Hell I was ready to go biblical on someone after a week in Milwaukee.

So for long time readers you know I have a mostly rigid policy of not talking about work… well tonight the curtain gets pulled back briefly and open up a new avenue of total and utter crap that no one but myself will care about.

I got business cards this week… I’ve been in my “carreer” for 8 years now and I never had business cards before this week.  I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal to most of you, but to me it’s a moment… it means I can finally leave my laptop at my damn desk and not be worried that I will need to give someone my contact info.   Yes these are the things I worry about at work because it’s just about the only thing that I can control.

And now the work curtain goes back up, pay no attention to the person pulling the strings behind the curtain.

Moving on, it’s October in Phoenix which means two things… first I have a green lawn again since I put in my winter lawn and it took right away.  Second it means it’s finally cool enough at night to sit on the back porch with a whiskey drink and a laptop and blog away.

Not that I have anything to say… other then the genius playlist that I have going right now is utter crap.  Oh wait it just turned to U2 from 1992… Ah Jr. High… The school sucked but the music was good.

I dont know if other people do this or not but I use Jr. High as the touchstone of adolescence but it’s also a marker for alot of other things too.  Like when I discovered U2 with Achtung Baby (Mysterious Ways was the song… I drove my parents crazy with that CD) my 8th grade English and History teachers who would let us watch MTV or the Price is Right in class…. The English teacher was a new grad hired in the middle of the year and I was transfered into her class along with 25 other unruly 13 and 14 year olds… She couldn’t have been more then 23 at the time.   She was probally more intersted in watching MTV then teaching us anyway.  The history teacher just didn’t care, we were her only class that was Special ED.   I knew it was bad when I knew more about the state of Arizona and WW2 Battles then here at 13 years old.   Mind you this is 1992/1993 so it’s before the Internet and History channel in Kingman.  So everything I knew came from whatever I saw on the Discovery Channel and PBS along with whatever books the grandfathers had given me.

Now that I have the old memory bank juices flowing (not that a little bit of whiskey doesnt help the process a bit) what other things stand out in my mind about the 1991/1993 time frame?

-Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog… see the part about the 23 year old english teacher and MTV…. granted this is when MTV played videos.

-Finding 120 Minutes in the summer between years at Jr. High.  Midnights on Sunday on again MTV… That was the first place I saw a Sonic Youth or Suzanne Vega video… Lots of good “alternative” music from back in the day… mostly from bands that were never heard from again.

-Bill Clinton… being fully aware of and actually paying attention to a full election cycle… I’m sure that damaged me in more then a few ways.

-Whoop there it is… again MTV… I hold alot of disdain for MTV now but back in the day it was the only way I could get music that wasn’t top 40 or country.  Just remember I was in Kingman the fact we had a half way decent cable system was a small miracle.

-Windows 3.1… My in depth experince with a GUI “OS” I didn’t know it at the time but it was the start of something evil.  The school was still using Apple II’s w/ a green screen.   I didn’t use a Dos/Windows PC until I was a Junior in High School.   Also my first WTF is that thing expsoure to a floppy disk…

-Yugoslovia… being aware of a war that didn’t have clearly defined combatants and no easy answers.

-World Cup… watching a world cup for the first time and soccer becoming something other then the sport I played on Saturday Mornings in the fall.

Yes it was a momentous time… and it would seem that the bits that remain with me through the clouds of time and whiskey are the ones revoling around music and boobs….. And wouldn’t you know it those are two of my favorite things today too.

Mother mary won’t you listen…

Name the song and band I lifted tonights title from…  (Cody you can’t play, you know the answer) Winner gets a box of Nilla Waffers.

Bonus question… how many boxes of Nilla Wafters have I given out for prizes?  (Curtis you can’t play you know the answer)

Interesting fact… time it takes from the time I click “approve” on a comment to the time I get the email on my blackberry?  Just under 6 seconds… Which is all the more immpressive because I’m using Google for the email on this site and Blackberry Internet Service for my “familiar”

Yes witches have cats, wizards have owls, I have a blackberry.

While that does seem wrong… it also seems so SO SOO right.

So you want to know what is really frustrating…. importing music into your itunes library and not having it show up but you can see the files on the disk… now that is sheer frustration!

And at some point I will write something meaningful… tonight is not that night.

There are few things sweeter….

Then a big win in the regular season against a opponent that every one thinks your going to lose to.

It’s even sweeter when a bet made two months ago is paid in a voice mail, even though I was being way lippy during a pre-season game.

Matt, you are a good man which is why I have recorded the voice mail but I’m not posting it on the internet.
If however anyone would like to hear the voice mail…. well that can be arranged.

So there was a great disturbance in the force today….

I was at work today and suddenly at 15:17 local time I felt a wave of energy ripple through my body, like millions of people all went “WTF?” at the same time.

I came home to find a security update waiting for my Mac… but wait there was documenation on the apple website to boot!

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3216

Unless your a Mac user you have no idea how momentious this is, and if your a Mac hater you can now put documentation for security patches right next to “Right Clicking” in the catagories of things that the Mac used to not do but now does.

Pendelous type threads

So I know I can’t be the only one with this problem, but it’s kind of embarsing espically for someone like me…

How do you keep mulitple computer somewhat synchronized with contacts?

I know it’s stupid but hear me out… I have a blackberry Pearl and before that a Treo 700P that I sync’d at both home and work.  Syncing the treo at work and home caused me some problems, namely that my business contacts polluted my personel contacts and vice-versa.  Now I dont have much a problem with this but I don’t want the next great internet worm to come out of one of my computers and take down several large medical imaging device companies.

Not that it would happen I’m just saying…

So what do other people do with multiple computers and contact lists that they want on all of their computers?

I’ve thought about using google as my “master” archive and then feed down from there but that seems less then elegant and the more stuff I can keep off the cloud the better.

Oh and don’t forget I’m multi platfrom too… I use windows and mac and linux… I don’t care so much about linux, it’s more mac and windows I’m after.

Covers… sometimes they are worthy

I’m always keeping a eye out for TOOL covers… mainly because I really like the music (if you’ve ridden in my truck anytime in the last 3 years you know this already) and also it seems like they are rarely covered well.

I’ve found two covers that I think do the orginal song justice…. I think…

Staind \”Sober\”

And a acoustic version gotta give it a minute Aaron Lewis \”Sober\” Acoustic

and it would appear that I cannot embed you tube video… now that sucks.

In your world….

The homebrew is good…

Batch #3 has gotten WAAAAYYYY better with a month of aging… like much smoother and no bitter after taste.

We tapped that way to early

yes I’ve been drinking my beer…. yes I just made a “funny”